Phoronix

It was back in April 2017 that Canonical decided they would abandon Unity 8 and switch back to GNOME. While Mir played a big role together with Unity 8, they continued working on Mir with staffing changes and a shifted focus of adding Wayland support and tailoring it for primarily IoT use-cases and tightly integrated with their Snap packaging concept. Two years later, Mir is still alive and earlier this month marked the release of Mir 1.6. Here's a look back at the Mir highlights for 2019...

With yesterday's release of Wine 5.0-RC1 as the last feature release prior to the code freeze for this forthcoming annual Wine stable release, a number of the patches merged came via way of Wine-Staging...

Following yesterday's release of QEMU 4.2, the next version of this open-source processor emulator for hardware virtualization entering development is QEMU 5.0...

Back in August was the release of the very big CUPS 2.3 update that shifted the source code license, added support for IPP Printer presets, added a new utility, and other improvements for this Apple-controlled Unix/Linux printing system. Available now is CUPS 2.3.1 with various fixes...

Friday marked not only the release of QEMU 4.2 for Linux virtualization but Intel's open-source crew developing the Cloud-Hypervisor as the Rustlang-based VMM built around Linux's KVM and VirtIO interfaces is out with a big feature release...

As was expected, today marks the first release candidate of Wine 5.0 that ushers in the code freeze ahead of this annual stable update for running Windows programs and games on Linux and other platforms...

Fedora will continue producing ISO images of their distribution that can be installed to a DVD (or CD in the case of some lightweight spins) or more commonly these days copied to USB flash drives, but they are debating whether any CD/DVD optical media issues should still be considered blocker bugs in 2020 and beyond...

Valve has released Proton 4.11-10 and with this update to their blend of Wine that powers Steam Play is support for Halo: The Master Chief Collection among other Windows game improvements...

For a few years GNOME has supported a "launch on discrete GPU" option for applications within the Shell's menu while for GNOME 3.36 that support is being cleaned up and extended to also handle NVIDIA GPU configurations...

With 2019 quickly drawing to an end, I figured it would be interesting to see how the performance of Mozilla Firefox has been trending over the longer term. So for this article today is a look at the Firefox 57 through Firefox 71 stable performance plus tests of Firefox 72 beta and Firefox 73 alpha all from the same system and using a variety of browser benchmarks.

Last year one of Feral's top Linux developers left the company and now another top developer has sadly left the game porting firm...

Introduced last month was the Flatpak 1.5.1 development build that provided initial support for protected/authenticated downloads of Flatpaks as the fundamental infrastructure work towards allowing paid or donation-based applications within Flathub or other Flatpak-based "app stores" on Linux...

As anticipated, AMD has now formally released a new version of their AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver following this week's Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Windows driver release...

QEMU 4.2 is out this morning as a key piece of the open-source Linux virtualization stack...

While LibreOffice 6.4 isn't even coming out until the end of January, we are already stoked about the follow-on release to this open-source office suite... Currently the development builds are towards LibreOffice 6.5 (though given the big impact we wouldn't be surprised if it morphed into LibreOffice 7.0) and one of the features that landed at the end of November is the Cairo drawing being replaced by Skia and with that Vulkan-based rendering support for this free office suite...

Fedora Linux is on track to deliver another bleeding-edge compiler toolchain stack with Fedora 32 due out this spring...

Released earlier this month was Phoronix Test Suite 9.2 while now available is a point release with a couple of fixes...

Earlier this week AMD unveiled the Radeon Software Adrenalin 2020 Edition driver and we await a Radeon Software for Linux / AMDGPU-PRO driver update for Linux users on supported distributions. But AMD has begun pushing some updated AMDVLK open-source Vulkan driver code ahead of a possible tagged release in the next few days...

After a few weeks worth of delays due to blocker bugs the release of Mesa 19.3 is out today as a big end-of-year upgrade to the open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for Linux systems. Intel and AMD Radeon driver changes largely dominate the work as always but there is a growing number of embedded driver changes and other enhancements for this crucial piece to the open-source 3D ecosystem...

For those preferring the Vim text editor, Vim 8.2 is out today and its primary new feature is support for "popup windows" and for demonstrating those new capabilities is even a new Vim-based game called Killer Sheep...